Holy hobbits! Small beings are a huge find
Fossils show miniature human relatives lived on Indonesian island
The cozy burrows part isn’t true, but J.R.R. Tolkien got it partly right: Hobbits really did walk the Earth. According to many scientists, a species of miniature beings distantly related to Homo sapiens once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. An international team unearthed fossils of the hobbits’ ancestors — fossils that may point to a radical explanation for why hobbits, officially known as Homo floresiensis, were so small.
The fossils suggest hobbits descended from much bigger forebears who “experienced extreme dwarfism on the island of Flores,” Gerrit van den Bergh of Australia’s University of Wollongong said Tuesday. Their height “was reduced to two-thirds of ancestral body size, and brain volume shrank to half the size.”
That explanation is sparking debate, but there’s little dispute that Flores’ hobbits, discovered in a cave in 2003, were astoundingly small. The most complete skeleton found in the cave suggests adults were far shorter than the average kindergartner. From that specimen and others, scientists have a portrait of a small-brained species that made crude stone tools and lived on Flores from at least 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
The new fossils, discovered in 2014 at a site called Mata Menge, are 700,000 years old and just as tiny as the hobbits from the cave, the team reported in Nature. A partial jawbone found by van den Bergh’s team “would fit in the palm of my hand,” says Debbie Argue of the Australian National University, who was not part of the study team.
Van den Bergh and his colleagues say the Mata Menge hobbits are closely related to the younger cave hobbits and might be the same species.
Bigger forebears “experienced extreme dwarfism on the island of Flores.” Gerrit van den Bergh, University of Wollongong